As a marketer, leaning in and leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) can help elevate your advertising campaigns. Here are three ways in which AI and advertising technology (AdTech) can be your co-pilot while you remain in the driver’s seat.
Putting your audience first
The highly fragmented digital marketing landscape is undergoing a seismic shift. With the advertising industry moving away from third-party cookies, many marketers are redefining their strategies around data and are shifting to an audience-based approach for their campaigns to achieve greater brand impact and results.
The crumbling cookie, which has been a long-standing digital advertising tool, represents a challenge for brands and marketers to find alternative identity solutions across multiple channels that provide access to verified audiences. This may not matter too much to marketers who have already embraced first-party data, retail data, and alternative identifiers — but for those who haven’t, now is the time to ride this wave of change.
Audience-based advertising embraces opportunities in the increasingly fragmented media landscape, where we consume media in our everyday lives. Brands can turn fragmentation into opportunities for connection, conversation, and conversion.
The devil is in the data
Quality data, especially brands’ own first-party data, will be the cornerstone of the future of advertising. Unlike third-party cookies, which often rely on generalized, impersonal information, first-party data offers a direct connection to consumer preferences because it is based on their interaction with your brand and products.
First-party data is the most powerful asset for marketers to truly understand consumer behavior online and inform their audience targeting decisions. Although targeting customers is nothing new, digital advertising tools are. Today, look-alike audience segmentation can be powered by AI, which can analyze huge amounts of data in a very short time, enabling a programmatic execution of more precise targeting that can be both cost-effective and scalable.
In addition, for brands that mainly sell through traditional shops and therefore may not have a lot of owned first-party data, retail data will likely be a crucial piece of the omnichannel puzzle in a post-cookie environment. Retailers have powerful information about shoppers — from their online browsing behaviors to abandoned carts and, most importantly, the items purchased. The decision by many major retailers to share consented data on shopper behavior is a key leap for the advertising industry. The fact that advertisers can extract insights from retail data can help radically change digital marketing, enabling brands to optimize and attribute touch points in the pursuit of the most important KPI of all: sales.
To leverage this wealth of information and harness the power of data-driven advertising, AI and advertising technology (AdTech) emerge as linchpins.
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AI and AdTech — a formidable toolkit
With the support of AI and AdTech platforms, marketers can access vast amounts of advertising opportunities on the open internet. They can apply an efficient, scalable, and targeted approach to connect with audiences and consolidate all the different channels and advertising formats. For example, we see about 15 million ad opportunities each second. Each comes with several additional data points regarding location, device, weather, and details about the audience. This amount of data is impossible for a human to analyze but at the same time provides plenty of fuel for AI to deliver powerful insights and recommendations.
This powerful technology makes data-driven insights more accessible and translates them into actionable advertising strategies. Thus, advertisers can aim to maximize the impact of their ad budgets, reach the right audiences exactly where they spend their digital time, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns through real-time data on impressions, clicks, and conversions — as well as tangible business outcomes like sales, booked holidays, or visits to car showrooms.
By embracing data-driven advertising powered by AI and AdTech, brands can unlock new opportunities for growth, enhance customer engagement, and drive measurable results. However, as with any tool, success ultimately hinges on how these technologies are wielded. Transparency and cross-channel measurement are key in today’s omnichannel landscape. While marketers retain control, AI should be seen as a co-pilot that can handle the data-heavy tasks, compare ad performance across different channels and platforms, and make shifts where needed for maximum reach and impact.
About Terry Kane
Terry Kane is Managing Director of Middle East & Africa at The Trade Desk, based in Dubai. He was born in Ireland and has lived in the UAE since 2008 with over 20 years of experience in the field of advertising and digital media. A broad range of executive positions across different sectors gave him comprehensive experience in tech, digital strategy, and sales and marketing. Over the past nine years, Kane held multiple leadership roles at Meta. Prior to that, he led digital strategy for the Jumeirah Group for eight years. Kane holds multiple undergraduate degrees from leading universities in the UK and Ireland, an MBA from London Business School, as well as several local and international board positions.
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